The New Car Assessment Program has been the gold standard for evaluating vehicles’ safety aspects. First created in 1979 by the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, its success at reducing crash fatality and injuries by encouraging better safety design and customer awareness [1] led to its widespread adoption to other countries, like the European Union Countries (Euro NCAP), Australia and New Zealand Australasian ANCAP, and Japan with JNCAP. Malaysian Institute of Road Safety (MIROS) pushed for a similar program catering for the South-East Asian market, first with the locally focused Malaysian Vehicle Assessment Program (MyVAP), culminating in the formation of ASEAN NCAP in 2011.

Nowadays, thanks to the program’s attentive focus on the performance of vehicular safety technologies as well as improved consumer information schemes, most vehicles that enter the ASEAN market have achieved at least four stars rating out of five [2]. However, the majority of NCAP around the world so far only focusing on improving the safety of passenger cars, while most road fatalities and injuries actually occur among motorcyclists, especially in South-East Asian countries. Worldwide, powered two-wheeler (PTW) deaths account for 23% to 28% of all road fatalities between 2013 and 2016 [3]. Southeast Asian countries contributed the most to PTW fatalities compared to other countries with 43% death – whereas, in Malaysia, 62.7% of road deaths were among motorcycle users [4]. The following figure shows the trend for road traffic fatalities in Malaysia for the past 10 years in which more than half of the fatalities were motorcyclists.